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Airlines waive fees as delays, cancellations mount

Headaches were building for air travelers Wednesday afternoon as a broad area of thunderstorms backed up flights at more than a half-dozen of the nation's busiest airports. Nationwide, 375 flights had been

Headaches were building for air travelers Wednesday afternoon as a broad area of thunderstorms backed up flights at more than a half-dozen of the nation's busiest airports.

Nationwide, 375 flights had been canceled as of 2:10 p.m. and another 3,900 delayed, according to flight-tracking company FlightStats. The flight cancellations were heaviest at some of the USA's busiest airports, including those serving New York City as well as Boston, Chicago O'Hare and Detroit.

United and Delta -- the nation's two biggest carriers -- each waived change fees for passengers in the New York area. JetBlue, which is the biggest carrier at Boston and has a hub at New York JFK, waived change fees at 10 different airports from Virginia through New England.

Among the airports seeing delays were Atlanta – the worlds' busiest – as well as Detroit, Cleveland Boston and four big airports serving the New York City and Philadelphia metro areas.

At San Francisco (SFO), where one of the airport's runways remains closed, flights at the West Coast's second-busiest hub where being delayed by an average of 2-½ hours as of 2 p.m. ET, according to the FAA.

It was likely that the problems at SFO and the airports in the East would ripple out and affect fliers elsewhere.

A flight from Minneapolis to Seattle, for example, could become delayed or canceled if the aircraft or crew scheduled to operate it gets bogged down because of the storms affecting airports in New York, Atlanta, Detroit and elsewhere.

Among the airlines that have hubs or focus cities that were being affected by delays as of 2:55 p.m. ET: American (New York JFK), Delta (Atlanta, Detroit, JFK, New York LaGuardia), JetBlue (Boston, JFK), United (Cleveland, Newark) and US Airways (Philadelphia).

Some smaller airports in the Northeast also saw a big impact from the storms. The 26 cancellations reported by FlightStats at Nantucket and the 17 at Hyannis represented a significant portion of the daily flight schedule at each of those Massachusetts airports.